New Delhi, Jun 8 (IANS): OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the creator of AI chatbot ChatGPT, has said that the company is not presently training GPT5 -- the successor to GPT4.

"We have a lot of work to do before GPT5. It takes a lot of time. We are nowhere close to it," Altman said at a conference hosted by The Economic Times in Delhi on Wednesday.

"We're working on the new ideas that we think we need for it, but we are nowhere close to the start. There need to be more safety audits: I wish I could tell you about the timeline of the next GPT," he added.

Altman's comments come amid growing concern among AI researchers and Big Tech executives about the alarming pace at which the technology is developing.

In March, several top entrepreneurs and AI researchers, including Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, wrote an open letter, asking all AI labs to immediately pause training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months.

Over 1,100 global AI researchers and executives signed the open letter to pause "all giant AI experiments".

After a few weeks, Altman acknowledged that the letter lacked the most technical nuance, but asserted that OpenAI hadn't started training GPT-5 and wouldn't do so for "some time".

In May, Altman admitted that if generative AI technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, as US Senators expressed their fears about AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

Altman, who testified at a hearing in the US Senate in Washington, D.C., said that the AI industry needs to be regulated by the government as AI becomes "increasingly powerful".

The Senators grilled him about the potential threats AI poses and raised fears over the 2024 presidential election.